Apple "chose" to agree to this deal with a gun to their head, the only other "option" being that they would be banned from the Chinese market. This isn't just because they have a data sovereignty requirement, but also because they have requirements regarding the sovereignty of a company's corporate governance structure.
>TikTok/Bytedance was one Trump EO away from being force sold to US companies (actual nationalization)
I'm not defending that idea, but a forced sale is categorically not nationalization. The whole impetus for the idea was that Trump's "eye for an eye" approach regarding what he saw as unfair practices against other US companies that tried to operate there. And in the end, Bytedance challenged it, and it never came to fruition.
There aren't any functional counterparts to these checks on power in China that would have been relevant to Apple/GBCD. There's no independent judiciary or alternative ruling party.
IMO this is just reality of mediating "strategic" foreign companies operating domestically, especially from "adversarial" countries. Set legal compliance onerously high and hope they leave. Western platforms left PRC because they couldn't stomach the filtering requriements that every PRC company has to shoulder. And when they finally adopted improve moderation due to requirements/pressure in their host country, they tried to get back into the PRC market. Meanwhile TikTok is sticking around US because Douyin survived burdens of PRC regulatory environment so what's another difficult market. Both markets are difficult, TikTok just better at playing ball in such enviroments. FB/Google can't even control their own employees from sabotaging their return to PRC.